


Cathartic Psychotherapy: Black Ops

by Eloisa



Category: The Oregon Files - Clive Cussler
Genre: Doctor/Patient, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Missing Scene, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Shameless Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-21
Updated: 2014-12-21
Packaged: 2018-03-02 17:42:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,221
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2820719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eloisa/pseuds/Eloisa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A missing scene from The Jungle.  Juan finally finds time to let Hux examine him following the Insein escape.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cathartic Psychotherapy: Black Ops

As Juan made to close the door to Medical behind him, he heard Julia’s soft footfall follow him to the doorway. “Come back, Chairman.”

He stopped in the corridor, prosthetic and flesh-and-bone feet both nestling on thick carpet, and looked back at her. She’d re-dyed her hair to its natural brown in the hours since they returned to the _Oregon_ : now back in her customary lab coat over a skirt and shirt instead of Chinese army uniform, there was nothing left aside from a little faded fake tan to remind him of the faux aide who had come to his rescue. “What is it?”

Julia gestured towards the cubicle beyond the one where MacD Lawless was dozing off. “I still haven’t examined you – it’s necessary irrespective of you having rested and rehydrated.”

He shrugged. “OK.” Worried as he was about Linda, he couldn’t do anything about her situation until the _Oregon_ reached Brunei, and repeatedly rethinking their position wasn’t getting him anywhere yet.

He retreated to the cubicle and started removing his clothes one-handed. Hux drew the curtains around the bed – not for privacy from MacD, who was already snoring again, but from any orderlies or minor injury patients who might come in – and, when Juan’s fingers hesitated, unsure how best to remove his shirt, she eased it off him from behind as if she were a cloakroom attendant in a high end hotel.

“Thank you,” Juan said, untangling the sling from around his neck so she could slide the shirt off his left arm. It caught in his blond hair partway.

“All part of the job description. Lie down, please.”

Juan hesitated, eyes on the medical gurney. Flat, slim, height adjustable. For a moment, though he was nude, it seemed too hot in the infirmary. Very difficult to breathe in such anoxic air.

He perched on the bed’s edge, swung up his legs and slowly lay down, using his good arm to steady himself. Somewhere inside was the locus of absolute self-control he’d found in Insein. He just had to find it.

He squinted up against too-bright light, not sure for a moment whom he would see, but when his eyes cleared he saw just Hux peering down at him, mouth set in a doctor’s reserved expression and a few strands of brown hair escaping from her ponytail to frame her face. She drew an array of diagnostic equipment up to the bed on a trolley, and without disturbing his collarbone – as she’d said earlier, there was nothing she could do for it bar assist him to rest it – slid a blood pressure monitor onto his right wrist and a pulse oximeter onto his left hand. Juan tensed as the blood pressure monitor expanded. Just another weight, like the ones he wore to swim. Nothing more.

“Juan, I need you to relax,” Hux said, eyes on the readouts. “Excess physical tension will invalidate the result.” Cabrillo forced his shoulders down, and felt his neck vertebrae loosen: maybe he’d succeeded, for Julia nodded once and removed the monitors. “Blood pressure on the low side: blood oxygen also low, and pulse rate elevated. I’ll test all three again in ten minutes.” She swabbed his right arm’s elbow for a blood test.

As was his habit, Juan watched as she slid in the needle and extracted a vial of blood. She had such practiced hands that he barely felt it. “Your electrolyte balance should be returning to normal by now,” she said, “but if this tells me I need to keep you in here on a drip for another few hours I’ll do so.”

“That may need to change to keeping a drip beside me in the ops room.”

“We’ll see.” She set the blood vial aside for diagnosis, turned back to him and paused, eyes on the purpling bruise stripes criss-crossing his belly, groin and left pectorals. For a moment Juan thought he saw her start to reach for the clavicle bruising, but instead she set her stethoscope to her ears and laid its bell on Juan’s chest. “Deep breaths, please.”

He drew in a long breath and stopped, reluctant to exhale. How long could he hold it, if he had to? He’d swum underwater for minutes at a time before now.

_Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink…_

“Chairman.”

He let the breath out and drew in another, then another, then another. Hux moved the stethoscope to another spot on his chest, then turned it to employ its diaphragm. Juan stared at the ceiling, trying not to look at her, willing himself not to see the inside of that baking truck when he did so. Dwell on the positives, as he’d implied to MacD? He’d survived, after all. They both had.

After a minute she removed the stethoscope from her ears and set it aside. “Well?” Juan asked.

“Can you turn onto your right side unaided?” she said instead of answering his oblique question, expression unchanging. “I want to check your head injury.”

He could, and balanced himself inches from falling off the bed while she probed the hair at the back of his skull. “I always knew you were remarkably hard-headed, Chairman,” she said after a moment. He made a non-committal sound in response. Lying on his side, his left arm dragged at his pectoral muscles and collarbone. He focused on the feel of the bed beneath him and the sound of the _Oregon_ ’s engine rumbling below decks. By the time Julia withdrew her hands from his head and instructed him to lie on his back again, he’d forgotten he was in pain.

Julia picked up a pen light from the tray beside her. “Your skull is indeed intact. Just two stitches required in your forehead. Now, open your mouth for me.”

He obeyed without thinking about it. She shone the light into his mouth and eased his jaw downwards a little, fingers light around his facial bruises. Juan tensed his stomach muscles at the touch on his lips. _Just Hux_ , he told himself, and he relaxed.

“Some inflammation back here,” she said, “but I see no dental damage from this angle. One moment.” She gripped the light between her teeth, and picked up a dentist’s mirror from the tray and slid it into Juan’s mouth.

Mirror metal touched the back of Juan’s throat, as cold as dripping water. Cobra-fast, his hand snaked out and grabbed Julia’s wrist, forcing the mirror away.

For a moment the only thing he could hear was their breathing, hoarse and fast from him, slow and steady from her. The infirmary lights seemed to pulse, misty orange like a dying sun. Then Julia delicately spat the pen light onto the bed. “Chairman, let go of my arm.”

Her voice was too even, Juan realised. She’d been holding the mirror in her left hand the whole time – she, who was right-handed. That right hand must be hovering on the panic button built into the bed frame. It must have been there since she’d picked up the mirror.

He stared at her, image of calm above him, and then at his hand squeezing her wrist. For a moment the world throbbed. He couldn’t remember how to open his fingers. Another neurone fired, and he realised that if he didn’t remember quickly, she would press the panic button, and somewhere between one orderly and the whole ship’s complement would come in to prise him off her.

Slowly, he unwrapped first one finger, then the next, then the next, from round Hux’s wrist. Free, his hand shook like a pneumatic drill. He dropped it nerveless to the bed, and closed his eyes.

Alone among the crew, Julia Huxley knew everything about him. All his foibles, all his failings, all his fragilities. This latest addition to the list should be no different. For that frozen moment, Juan prayed that Hux would see it the same way. She’d been there for every one of his worst moments: he had no idea what he would do were she not.

He felt another touch on his mouth, and clenched his fists, dread-wracked despite his best intentions: but instead of searing pain flooding his head, her lips met his. He opened his mouth slightly, and her tongue slid inside, caressing him as she kissed.

Eyes still shut, he heard her white coat hit the floor and felt her lie down beside and half on top of him. She broke off the kiss, breathing a little harder than before. “I prescribe –” She kissed him again. “As soon as your collarbone has begun remodelling and providing that the fluid in your lungs clears up –” Another kiss. “A strong dose of laps in the pool –” And another. “With a lifeguard or equivalent on hand.” She nestled down against his uninjured right side, twining her limbs against his. “I want you to re-accustom yourself under controlled conditions to having a lot of water in your mouth and up your nose, _before_ the next inevitable occasion when you have to swim hard for safety.” Again she kissed him, this time a string of breathy nibbles up his jawline and along his face. “Then we just have to provide a different context for lying flat on your back unable to move, hmm?”

He’d already been half-aroused by the brush of her groin against his: as her hand slid down and began to explore him, delicate and inventive in skirting his bruises, he felt himself harden. Deliberately, fiercely, he kissed her back, pressing her against him with his right hand, pulling her hair free of her ponytail and letting it cascade round them both: then he dropped his fingers to her skirt hem, and slid up her thigh to her shapely hips, towing fabric with it. Almost on instinct he cupped his hand to slide over her buttocks. A tiny irrelevant thought protruded: whether he’d find her to be wearing cotton or lace underneath.

His hand closed on bare skin. He slid his fingers round the top of her thigh to her groin and, still finding no underwear at all, wound them into her pubic hair. Momentary surprise blossomed into desire, stronger than ever. Burning within him, it fought for space with other emotions: his personal fight to stay taut and ready till the mission was done, misgiving that he _should_ _not be doing this_ with any member of his crew and certainly not his chief medical officer, impotent rage at the Burmese military for weakening him this badly, and hot fury at Croissard and Smith, and himself, for getting them into this situation from the start.

He cracked his eyes open and stared up at Julia. Her face, delicately flushed, was millimetres from his. “Stay where you are, Juan,” she said softly, and she smiled down at him with enough warmth to melt icebergs. He nodded and, moving nothing but his fingertips, stroked circles round her lower lips. She felt so incredibly soft and inviting.

Julia eased her skirt up to her waist and, without bothering to pull off the rest of her clothes, slid down and onto his erection. Juan swallowed a cry and bucked up into her. “I said, stay where you are,” she said in an unsteady voice, and before he could protest she levered herself half-upright and caught his wrists in her hands, just above his cuff bruises, pinning him to the bed with most of her body weight.

Now he really couldn’t move, short of throwing her right off him, but he didn’t want to move. She began to work herself up and down on him, squeezing him hard and hot inside her. He gasped, again fighting not to cry out. Waves of pleasure built up and up inside him as she rode him. The last three days seemed a blank, a nothing, an irrelevance: nothing existed but him, and her, above him, as deep and forgiving as a tropical calm.

With almost no warning he realised he was coming. For a moment he almost blacked out, then collapsed back against the pillow, struggling for air. Julia, flushed and panting, rose and fell on top of him for another few moments before arching her back with a strangled sob.

Still with him half inside her, she dropped down and pillowed her head on his chest, releasing his arms. He raised his trembling right arm and wrapped it around her, pressing her tight to him. _Thank you, Doctor Huxley_ , he mouthed, but no sound came out.

They lay tangled together in silence for what felt like several minutes, till, from many decks down, the _Oregon_ ’s engine tone shifted. Juan turned his head at the sound: Julia wriggled out of his encircling arm, clambered off him and started straightening her clothes.

At long last, Juan regained his voice. “Did you go commando for your entire shift?” he said hoarsely.

Hux shrugged slightly, as best she could while repairing her ponytail. “I knew you would come down here at some point, and remembered my old Girl Scout motto – ‘be prepared’.”

*

Many days later, when the hydrofoil drew back up to the _Oregon_ ’s side and Juan clambered onto deck still damp from the mine flood, the first person he saw was Julia, standing at the companionway entrance with a faint smile on her bow-shaped lips.


End file.
